While on tour in California a couple of months back, I read Juliana Spahr's The Transformation, certainly one of the best novels (if it's a novel) published in my lifetime, and the best investigation I've seen of the questions and contradictions that thoughtful North Americans (and, in particular, politically concerned artists) tend to run into in the 21st century.

Spahr's novel is intelligent, moving, crucial, tentative in all the best ways while remaining emphatic in its ethical commitment. It's the story of the change in her writing that led to her wartime poetry collection, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. Told almost entirely in the third person plural, it's the story of a three-person relationship that moves to Hawaii in the late '90s. There "they" meet with a series of contradictions and absent places: their roles as low-grade pawns in the post-grad employment machine, which is at the same time a vast system reproducing cultural imperialism in a colonized place; the ecology, alien to them but also invasive as regards the island; the lack of social support for the kind of sexual relationship they've undertaken; the foregrounding of the impossibility of ranking issues of class, race, gender, and aesthetic commitments. It's the story of their subsequent move to another colonized set of islands (New York), and the effects of 9/11 and the beginning of the "War on Terror" on every aspect of their lives. Most of all, it's a story about discovering vulnerabilities, at first imposed upon the "they" of the book, and finally sought after in the consciousness that only the opening of themselves to all these contradictions, difficulties and dangers can make possible a life and a writing that could, in the midst of social, cultural, economic and political crisis, point toward more desirable forms of human existence.

I'm thankful for this courageous cultivation of vulnerability, this openness to one's possible and even inevitable wrongness that nonetheless refuses resignation, choosing instead to see ethical contradiction and error as the mask shown by possible alternatives in a historical period that blocks their real appearance.

Paul Chan's video films might be an excellent example of vulnerablist political art.

Three of them were shown at the Madison MCA this evening, and I'll write about two:

RE: THE_OPERATION (2002), a half-hour series of invented letters and emails from the Bush cabinet as they fight the "war on terror" on the ground in the Middle East, seems like a setup that could only result in sarcastic caricature (which could be perfectly good satire--"what if they really did have to serve in the armed forces"). Instead, the text Chan gives these politicos includes a more or less ordinary letter from George to Laura, a musing by Condi on masculine equations of war and sex, an anonymously delivered, predatory sexual message by Ashcroft, a press release regularly disrupted by static, a text by Blanchot on friendship. Some of it's funny, most is variously strange--and even the moments of "character assassination" lack any "nyah-nyah." I find the tone (or various tones) admirable and moving, as well as profoundly disorienting.

It's Baghdad In No Particular Order (2003) that particularly inclines me to give Chan the Vulnerablist's Stamp of Approval. A fifty-minute sequence of pieces of footage from Chan's 2002 trip to Baghdad with Voices in the Wilderness, this is "artless" art in the best sense; Chan's technique with the hand-held camera is, by his own admission, "not that good," and the cinematography has the look of any video shot by a highly thoughtful, sensitive and observant tourist--because it more or less is that, rather than an imitation of that style by someone trying to make their work look "authentic."

The juxtaposition of scenes is paratactical, as the title implies, though the composition is clearly thought-out. The voice-over (spoken not by Chan himself, but by a woman whose name I didn't manage to write down) is infrequent, usually just telling us the name of a person or type of music we're seeing. When the voice does wax philosophical, it does so without any need to produce an intellectual "ah-ha!" At one point, the voice says something like, "They only trust me enough to stare when I am blind... blindness is the prerequisite for clairvoyance--" a direct reflection on the situation of filming (in this case, a pair of fascinated, silent children toward whom Chen has turned the viewer screen on which they're displayed) and a less direct one on the intention to show the film to others. Both in the film and on his website, Chen is refreshingly unapologetic in his love of philosophy, it's always both interesting and relevant (in one Godardian moment Chan puts a quote from Adorno's Aesthetic Theory into the mouth of a girl showing a drawing to the camera, and it works wonderfully). His program note frames BINPO as a Benjaminian project, which it manages to be, with less pretense than any other self-described Walterwerks I've encountered (Benjamin might be the philosopher who comes closest to Vulnerablism).

I don't think I've described the film very well. Perhaps a single moment will illustrate it better:

Throughout, the camera wobbles and swerves, and there are many close-ups that are too extreme for the lens to focus; subjects blur in and out. Toward the end of the film, the camera lingers, in a dim room, on a series of (I'm pretty sure) black-and-white snapshots of people who have died, the shot so close that, in general, they appear as face-shaped blobs with dark holes for eyes--almost skulls. This closeness, however, also means that any tiny movement of the camera has a huge effect, and so part of a face will become clear as the lens is tilted just a bit, or the entire photo becomes visible for a second. On occasion, this movement results in the haunting illusion of the eyes blinking--the shifting of focus in different directions on multiple areas of the picture is disorienting enough that the photo seems to have come to life.

Both of the latter two films, and this one in particular, meet the major Vulnerablist criteria (loose and tentative as they are): rough edges (not as a pose, but also treated as compositional material), room for humor and mournfulness as well as Brechtian alienation, directness and philosophical complexity, parataxis and naturalism, the inclusion of the composing subject without the protection either of accusing or excepting itself, careful reflexivity and a moment-by-moment openness to what happens.

No conclusion.

The "footnotes" (aka "Part II" of the film, an archive of texts, sound, paintings, and clips from the film) are online.

I have an essay on poetry and political ethics (an expansion on some ideas presented in an earlier post here) in the first issue of Absent, an online magazine that looks excellent. Now that I finally have time to read through its contents, I’m carefully going through editor Simon DeDeo’s essay “Towards an Anarchist Poetics.” I like it a lot, and plan on posting my thoughts in response here.

My own essay (which is—I think—the magazine’s lone PDF, due to complexities resulting from my sending it in at the last possible minute) has had a couple of nice comments from Kent Johnson and Josh Corey. Thanks, guys.

Vulnerability

I just posted this in response to a strand on the Buffalo Poetics list, and thought it came out well enough to put here:

The claim that poetry and politics are essentially opposed is a sigh of resignation that wants to make itself universal.

In a recent workshop on "Poetry and the News" (given at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee), Kerri Sonnenberg put some emphasis on the value of "vulnerability" for poetry that concerns itself with politics. The explicit suggestion was that a political poem is more likely to appeal to/reach a reader if the poet doesn't seem to already know all the answers to her questions (and, therefore, if the poem raises questions-- this said with the caveat that a totally open indecisiveness that anyone can feel comfortable with is NOT what's being recommended). There are a number of appealing things about this notion and the ways it can be expanded.

For one thing, "vulnerability," leaving oneself open to error and to multiple possible solutions (and to more interesting problems than the ones we're handed--and, because of all this, to attack), seems to me to be an essential ethical concept at this time, when we've suffered through almost five years of a relentless emphasis on "security." Support for the all-out "war on terror" has been (especially since 9/11) based largely on an insistence on the right to a total safety; do I need to point out that this safety is factually impossible? That nothing whatsoever can ensure an absolute safety on any scale? In the face of this, the demand for invulnerability amounts to a sociopathic paranoia. This is as true on the interpersonal scale as it is on the global. Letting vulnerability be is one way of removing oneself from power relations whose tendency is to reproduce themselves (indefinitely deferring their own impossible satisfaction), and whose consequences are brutal.

Recently, as part of an ongoing investigation of her book "The Fatalist," I watched a Kelly Writers' House talk given by Lyn Hejinian (archived on the PennSound site), in which she discusses the "open text" explicitly in terms of the contrary desire for closure, again in reference to 9/11. She identifies the need to close the narrative begun by the events of that day as one of the major political crises of our day.

Too often the idea of "openness" in poetry is oversimplified (made vague and broad) and caricatured, mostly by people who want to take a swipe at "LangPo," and can do so by not examining the actual work of those writers, but instead taking one or two sentences from an essay written in the late '70's and riffing on that. In her talk, Hejinian proposes one of many specific kinds and functions of openness (the "rejection of closure" for crucial political reasons) in poetic writing.

Openness and vulnerability. Poetry is a comparatively safe place to practice these. Even a prescriptive political poetry (isn't this an unlikely term? who will have their politics prescribed by a poem? "no-one listens to poetry") can allow its prescriptions to include their own cracks, uncertainties, provisionalities, tactical transiences, the new questions and problems raised by those very solutions offered as prescriptions. Vulnerability means maintaining a space for an active, thinking listening in the face of the insistent beat of rectitude that can only be heard and absorbed.

("no/ one listens to poetry")